Kojima: Characters Should "Make You Want to Cosplay"

Hideo Kojima is an interesting person to follow on Twitter, for a variety of reasons.

When he's not tweeting about how much he's enjoying the sausage he's currently consuming or posting tantalizingly enigmatic things, he occasionally shares some enjoyable insights into what goes through his mind when he's working on his various projects. And earlier today was one of those times.

"I've been ordering Yoji [Shinkawa, lead artist on Metal Gear Solid V] to make the character more erotic," Kojima blurted out, seemingly without context, earlier today. "And he did it well."

He elaborated: "Recently I've been making characters this way: I create the setting thoroughly, how he/she spent early life, name, style, favorite phrase, fashion, action to stand the character out. The initial target is to make you want to do cosplay or its figurine to sell well."

Certainly, no-one can accuse Metal Gear's characters of being bland or uninteresting, regardless of whether or not you're a fan of how Kojima and the gang do things as a whole. Every character is distinct from the others, and in possession of a number of unique traits -- not just in terms of visual design, either. No, a Kojima character typically distinguishes themselves from others in a variety of ways -- speech patterns, behavior, way of moving, voice actor -- and it's generally pretty easy to quickly get a firm grasp on who they are, what they do, how they act and even how they sound.

Kojima ascribes this school of character design to his enjoyment of the Mad Max movies.

"Every character is well characterized," he mused. "This is important. Even characters without names or lines have strong characteristics. No need to depend on his/her past flashback. You are able to read the character by observing his/her silhouette, look, and the way he/she walks."

Kojima's musings today weren't just idle thinking out loud; he actually had an announcement to make, and that is that he'll be revealing the full character design of Metal Gear Solid V's character "Quiet" at midnight Pacific Time this Friday. The reveal of Quiet ("including detail of her back," he was keen to point out) is primarily intended for cosplayers who are headed to the Tokyo Game Show later this month, but it'll be interesting for fans of the series to get a look at her complete design, too. Kojima noted that he's making this announcement due to a specific request from a cosplayer; unable to reveal confidential information to an individual, he simply decided to make the information public.

What of the character Shinkawa was asked to make "more erotic," though?

"This one may not be cosplayable," said Kojima, seemingly posting a picture of said character's backside by way of explanation -- though there's a chance that this posterior actually belongs to Quiet, going by past footage. "Something like this, for example."

Thanks for that, Kojima. Now everyone in this coffee shop is looking at me funny.

I like the idea of fans having a connection with developers that changes the direction of a game like this, especially when it's an auteur like Kojima we're talking about. Of course, the whole "make it sexier" eye-candy aspect doesn't really diversify character design. At all. It's old and incredibly narrow-minded.